Morons. Yet another example of the USPO idiocy. Why they ever granted such a blatantly obvious patent is beyond me; perhaps its lawyer-generated obfuscation rolled their eyes back, eh?
We were doing this with Usenet mail decades ago. I personally wrote scripts (perl and Unix shell scripts, of course) to parse incoming uploader email at the major software archive site I was supporting. Trivial.
Man, I despise patent trolls. Shakespeare had it right: "First, we shoot all the lawyers."
Precisely. Sort the voters' names in alphabetical order, for neatness' sake. Keep the actual vote records time-stamped (to address that 10,000 votes in 0.00001 seconds issue).
Trivial. Too bad they didn't think of it at the beginning. (Doh!)
The stupid coupon site used simple procedures to "ensure" that coupons wouldn't be duplicated. They were stupid, they were shortsighted, and they got screwed.
I see those huge cooling towers and water cooling systems.. and I have to wonder...
How efficient is a power generation plant that throws away gigawatts of power as waste heat?
Isn't it about time you find a more efficient way to generate power, turbines and generators that don't waste so much heat that we just went to all that trouble to make in the first place?
I don't expect 100% efficiency, but what we're doing now is crazy.
I for one have no problems with this at all. You're driving on MY highway, you've already complied (hopefully) with all the laws related to vehicle registration, insurance, licensing, sobriety, armament, etc.
So we (the ominous "we") "remember" where you (well, the car license plate anyway) were. Doh. Big bloody deal.
Usefulness of this data? Can't say. "Soooo.. you were driving by here right when the kidnapper stopped to bury the bodies in the Interstate median. See anything?" "Wait.. you said you were drunk in New Orleans the night of the murder! Why was your car here, not a half mile from the site of the burning orphanage?" "Hmmmm.. our records show you _here_ at 8:05:15, and _here_ at 8:06:00. You traveled 2.1 miles in less than a minute. Hmmmmm..."
Maybe useful, maybe not. Violation of your precious privacy? I don't think so. You want privacy, don't drive.
Very good point. Because I don't see why those stress areas are "required" at all! Given a thin enough (and long enough) strip, I submit that a Mobius strip could be formed that had any stresses evenly distributed along its entire length! There's no need for "kinks" anywhere!
'From a [legal] defense perspective, [Vista] scares me to death. One of the things I have a hard time educating my clients on is the volume of data that's now discoverable.'
Soooo.. educate your miscreant clients on how to safely violate the law. What's the best way to commit your crimes while leaving the fewest traces. "This is how you murder someone, and here's how to make a silencer, and here's how to make a car bomb."
"The problem is the grind, not the people violating the TOS. Leveling should be more of an introductory tutorial to the game and your character and should last a couple days. Gold should fall off trees, and everyone should start at maximum skill in tradeskills. As long as parts of the game are work rather than play, I am going to choose alternative methods that let me bypass them. Me doing so, doesn't affect you in the slightest."
The value of the object, the gold, the skill is because it _was_ hard to get. All values in games are purely artificial. Ever seen a rich kid, given everything they wanted? Any comments on THEIR value system? The word "spoiled brat" comes to mind, but that might just be dating myself. However a spoiled brat in a MMOG is no more pleasant than one in the real world.
When I worked hard, and you didn't, to gain the same objective.. you have just destroyed the value of that objective (to me).. and you've harmed me.
The fact that I'm a damned fool for putting any value at all on such a thing is beside the point. It had enough value to YOU as well, for you to pay real money for it. But since you've now effectively devalued my copy of it.. you've harmed me.
"That part where you grind and work hard for something in the game to earn it and get pissed when I buy it is not you feeling the effects. That is just you being an asshole."
Now that's a spoiled brat talking. I felt the effects of your buying it; you devalued what I worked hard for.
So I have all this furniture and possessions I stole from YOUR house.
I pile it up on my front yard and put up a big sign, "Here ya go, folks. Free stuff. Help yourself! Tips appreciated."
Exactly how am I not breaking the law? I'm not "distributing" your stolen property? Instead, all the people who come and take it are the sinners, not me?
And when it's all gone.. I'm then innocent of even possession of stolen property?
Agreed. Well, maybe not the Purity contents.. but something apparently is on the bottom of a hole. Maybe a sinkhole, true, but still a hole. A sinkhole opening into a huge dark cavern would not have inward slanting edges, they'd be outward slanting (getting wider toward the bottom, where it caved in).
Hmmmm.. oil?
Oh oh.. don't tell this Administration that! We'll be invading Mars, and you know how that upsets the locals.
[quote]think the real problem is that online games are almost exclusively about aggression. In almost all online games, the primary way you interact with the game world is a weapon. Even when you're in a party you're sometimes competing with your own party members. Until we have games that are founded on cooperation instead of competition, where your primary tools are something other than guns and swords, players of online games are going to be aggressive toward each other.[/quote]
Not necessarily always true. I refuse to play on WoW PVP servers, because it IS more like you describe. No problem: I just don't go there.
Sure, my character carries a sword or gun. But he doesn't duel, he doesn't PVP, he doesn't go to battlefields; it's just not his thing. He tends to help others (even the other side) doesn't expect (but appreciates) help from others, solos almost everything.
He experiences very little aggression, enjoys his questing and exploring, and generally has a good time.
Add-ons help. NoDuel is one: a polite (automatic) rejection of the first thick-neck chest-butting juvenile challenge, and they get ruder from there. In the end the jerk is ignored. Works for me.
He doesn't go nuts over role playing (although my characters frequent RP servers exclusively), but he appreciates people staying halfway in character. If they don't.. he just leaves.
So what's the problem again? No one can be aggressive against my characters; the worst they can do is maybe cheat me out of some targets. And I have LOTS of characters on several servers; it's very very simple to simply ignore the jerks, or just move on.
The only place I go online that has interaction is World of Warcraft. That's right, no chat rooms, no Instant Messaging, no other games.
WoW has always had Ignore, and I use it extensively. Someone's a jerk? One warning, and then that's the end of THAT conversation! (Or at least the jerk's side of it.) And that works for all channels, all situations, all circumstances. Oh, he's actually a poor misguided youth who simply needs help and guidance? Dot's nice, mon.. look to your therapist, fool.
And now that I've found two Most Excellent add-ons (Spam Guard Plus and Spam Sentry), that takes care of the gold selling pukes (ptui, may they rot in hell) spamming on most channels and via whisper.
I still, of course, report each and every single one of them, by name, to Blizzard. Because it's fundamentally Blizzard's fault that they exist and that they proliferate. There are easy fixes, and Blizzard (in search of the almighty dollar and an ever-growing customer base) refuses to take them. So I'll continue to bug them until hopefully (some day) they do something about it.
But the spammers (and the morons) are no longer an issue to me. This is a non-problem. And certainly not the End Of Interactive Online Civilization As We Know It.
You couldn't identify them? They had no way to identify themselves?
Sounds like a pretty crappy setup right from the start. You needed a better plan, bro, instead of being so damned greedy to take the customer's bucks. You did NOT plan for all contingencies, that's your fault. Sure, the customer is stupid. But you have to look out for them if you're doing business with them; that's YOUR responsibility, and that's why they paid you.
Just hand out their user name and password? That's dumb. And now YOU are part of the problem.
You can be absolutely sure I'll never do business with anyone like you.
And I _will_ sue whoever releases information like that.
Back in The Day when a lot of us were contributing to Public Domain (which was the term for a loose, undocumented, unlegalized form of Open Source back then).. we always heard the whines, "Well, what happens if someone takes this Public Domain code and sells it?"
Well, they sell it, that's what happens. If they were clever enough to find a buyer (to pay money for what would otherwise be free), more power to them. Hell, you're so smart, YOU go sell it! Feel free!
Add services, support, a fancy front end, user customization, whatever it takes. It's free, like beer! Do what you want!
Contribute to Public Domain if you want; we all do it for our own reasons (usually to share what we've learned, and to encourage more PD code so we can learn some more). If you're concerned about someone taking advantage of that.. well, we ALL take advantage of that in our own ways.
That was then. Some great stuff came out, and still does. Public Domain, Open Source, GPL, whatever.. the thieves and cheats are going to take advantage. That's life.
One great example, of which I was most proud to be a very small part, was the Info-Zip Project (or Workgroup). Google it; that was a project:-) I'll bet there are pieces of that really great code buried even in the Microsoft "compressed file" functions added around WinXP time as I recall.
And I'm sure lots and lots of commercial archiving programs stol... errr.. incorporated parts of our code, and probably with not a hint of credit either. (Wouldn't want anyone's lawyers worried, eh?)
But we were all in the Info-Zip Project for our own reasons (mostly to share and learn); we produced a great.zip archiver (for every kind of system from Commodore C-64's to Crays (really!)); and we all learned a lot. So what if none of us made a bloody penny?
Slashdot Mirror
Fully agree. Copyright or be damned.
Morons. Yet another example of the USPO idiocy. Why they ever granted such a blatantly obvious patent is beyond me; perhaps its lawyer-generated obfuscation rolled their eyes back, eh?
We were doing this with Usenet mail decades ago. I personally wrote scripts (perl and Unix shell scripts, of course) to parse incoming uploader email at the major software archive site I was supporting. Trivial.
Man, I despise patent trolls. Shakespeare had it right: "First, we shoot all the lawyers."
See above.
Fully agree.
Any legitimate business in my town requires a license. That license requires a point of contact (real person), and a real valid address.
There are no "anonymous" businesses. Why should there be?
So why should there be an "anonymous" domain holder?
Fully agree.
Precisely. Sort the voters' names in alphabetical order, for neatness' sake. Keep the actual vote records time-stamped (to address that 10,000 votes in 0.00001 seconds issue).
Trivial. Too bad they didn't think of it at the beginning. (Doh!)
The stupid coupon site used simple procedures to "ensure" that coupons wouldn't be duplicated. They were stupid, they were shortsighted, and they got screwed.
Tough.
I see those huge cooling towers and water cooling systems .. and I have to wonder ...
How efficient is a power generation plant that throws away gigawatts of power as waste heat?
Isn't it about time you find a more efficient way to generate power, turbines and generators that don't waste so much heat that we just went to all that trouble to make in the first place?
I don't expect 100% efficiency, but what we're doing now is crazy.
If their ads are that intrusive, I'm going to block them. If the ads are intrusive elsewhere, they're already blocked.
Screw 'em.
I for one have no problems with this at all. You're driving on MY highway, you've already complied (hopefully) with all the laws related to vehicle registration, insurance, licensing, sobriety, armament, etc.
.. you were driving by here right when the kidnapper stopped to bury the bodies in the Interstate median. See anything?" "Wait .. you said you were drunk in New Orleans the night of the murder! Why was your car here, not a half mile from the site of the burning orphanage?" "Hmmmm .. our records show you _here_ at 8:05:15, and _here_ at 8:06:00. You traveled 2.1 miles in less than a minute. Hmmmmm ..."
So we (the ominous "we") "remember" where you (well, the car license plate anyway) were. Doh. Big bloody deal.
Usefulness of this data? Can't say. "Soooo
Maybe useful, maybe not. Violation of your precious privacy? I don't think so. You want privacy, don't drive.
Toad
And then shoot them.
That would be good.
We don't shoot enough of the bastiges.
Really.
Very good point. Because I don't see why those stress areas are "required" at all! Given a thin enough (and long enough) strip, I submit that a Mobius strip could be formed that had any stresses evenly distributed along its entire length! There's no need for "kinks" anywhere!
...
No stress, no math. bidda bing
Yep, this kind of suit was detailed in a science fiction story, oh, 30 or 40 years ago.
'From a [legal] defense perspective, [Vista] scares me to death. One of the things I have a hard time educating my clients on is the volume of data that's now discoverable.'
.. educate your miscreant clients on how to safely violate the law. What's the best way to commit your crimes while leaving the fewest traces. "This is how you murder someone, and here's how to make a silencer, and here's how to make a car bomb."
...
Soooo
Sigh
First, let's kill all the lawyers.
Like I'm going to buy a printer that uses a cartridge with this sort of chip (or ANY sort of third-party restriction).
I'm already boycotting Brother (for building POS systems whose drivers don't work, and with outrageous ink cartridge prices). Who's next?
"The problem is the grind, not the people violating the TOS. Leveling should be more of an introductory tutorial to the game and your character and should last a couple days. Gold should fall off trees, and everyone should start at maximum skill in tradeskills. As long as parts of the game are work rather than play, I am going to choose alternative methods that let me bypass them. Me doing so, doesn't affect you in the slightest."
.. you have just destroyed the value of that objective (to me) .. and you've harmed me.
.. you've harmed me.
The value of the object, the gold, the skill is because it _was_ hard to get. All values in games are purely artificial. Ever seen a rich kid, given everything they wanted? Any comments on THEIR value system? The word "spoiled brat" comes to mind, but that might just be dating myself. However a spoiled brat in a MMOG is no more pleasant than one in the real world.
When I worked hard, and you didn't, to gain the same objective
The fact that I'm a damned fool for putting any value at all on such a thing is beside the point. It had enough value to YOU as well, for you to pay real money for it. But since you've now effectively devalued my copy of it
"That part where you grind and work hard for something in the game to earn it and get pissed when I buy it is not you feeling the effects. That is just you being an asshole."
Now that's a spoiled brat talking. I felt the effects of your buying it; you devalued what I worked hard for.
Who's the asshole?
Nuke them from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
So I have all this furniture and possessions I stole from YOUR house.
.. I'm then innocent of even possession of stolen property?
I pile it up on my front yard and put up a big sign, "Here ya go, folks. Free stuff. Help yourself! Tips appreciated."
Exactly how am I not breaking the law? I'm not "distributing" your stolen property? Instead, all the people who come and take it are the sinners, not me?
And when it's all gone
It is to puke.
Agreed. Well, maybe not the Purity contents .. but something apparently is on the bottom of a hole. Maybe a sinkhole, true, but still a hole. A sinkhole opening into a huge dark cavern would not have inward slanting edges, they'd be outward slanting (getting wider toward the bottom, where it caved in).
.. oil?
.. don't tell this Administration that! We'll be invading Mars, and you know how that upsets the locals.
Hmmmm
Oh oh
Doh.
"Honey, everything costs money. EVERYTHING. You better learn the price before you do it."
Gods, don't you just love Darwin?
[quote]think the real problem is that online games are almost exclusively about aggression. In almost all online games, the primary way you interact with the game world is a weapon. Even when you're in a party you're sometimes competing with your own party members. Until we have games that are founded on cooperation instead of competition, where your primary tools are something other than guns and swords, players of online games are going to be aggressive toward each other.[/quote]
.. he just leaves.
Not necessarily always true. I refuse to play on WoW PVP servers, because it IS more like you describe. No problem: I just don't go there.
Sure, my character carries a sword or gun. But he doesn't duel, he doesn't PVP, he doesn't go to battlefields; it's just not his thing. He tends to help others (even the other side) doesn't expect (but appreciates) help from others, solos almost everything.
He experiences very little aggression, enjoys his questing and exploring, and generally has a good time.
Add-ons help. NoDuel is one: a polite (automatic) rejection of the first thick-neck chest-butting juvenile challenge, and they get ruder from there. In the end the jerk is ignored. Works for me.
He doesn't go nuts over role playing (although my characters frequent RP servers exclusively), but he appreciates people staying halfway in character. If they don't
So what's the problem again? No one can be aggressive against my characters; the worst they can do is maybe cheat me out of some targets. And I have LOTS of characters on several servers; it's very very simple to simply ignore the jerks, or just move on.
Show a little flexibility, eh?
The only place I go online that has interaction is World of Warcraft. That's right, no chat rooms, no Instant Messaging, no other games.
.. look to your therapist, fool.
WoW has always had Ignore, and I use it extensively. Someone's a jerk? One warning, and then that's the end of THAT conversation! (Or at least the jerk's side of it.) And that works for all channels, all situations, all circumstances. Oh, he's actually a poor misguided youth who simply needs help and guidance? Dot's nice, mon
And now that I've found two Most Excellent add-ons (Spam Guard Plus and Spam Sentry), that takes care of the gold selling pukes (ptui, may they rot in hell) spamming on most channels and via whisper.
I still, of course, report each and every single one of them, by name, to Blizzard. Because it's fundamentally Blizzard's fault that they exist and that they proliferate. There are easy fixes, and Blizzard (in search of the almighty dollar and an ever-growing customer base) refuses to take them. So I'll continue to bug them until hopefully (some day) they do something about it.
But the spammers (and the morons) are no longer an issue to me. This is a non-problem. And certainly not the End Of Interactive Online Civilization As We Know It.
They'll NEVER be able to repair all the damage they've already done to uncountable numbers of systems. Puking maggots, may they rot in hell!
Changing their name isn't going to help either. Zango? Ptui, I _speet_ on Zango!
(yeah, I know, "Now tell us how you _really_ feel.")
You couldn't identify them? They had no way to identify themselves?
Sounds like a pretty crappy setup right from the start. You needed a better plan, bro, instead of being so damned greedy to take the customer's bucks. You did NOT plan for all contingencies, that's your fault. Sure, the customer is stupid. But you have to look out for them if you're doing business with them; that's YOUR responsibility, and that's why they paid you.
Just hand out their user name and password? That's dumb. And now YOU are part of the problem.
You can be absolutely sure I'll never do business with anyone like you.
And I _will_ sue whoever releases information like that.
Dumb asses.
Back in The Day when a lot of us were contributing to Public Domain (which was the term for a loose, undocumented, unlegalized form of Open Source back then) .. we always heard the whines, "Well, what happens if someone takes this Public Domain code and sells it?"
.. well, we ALL take advantage of that in our own ways.
.. the thieves and cheats are going to take advantage. That's life.
:-) I'll bet there are pieces of that really great code buried even in the Microsoft "compressed file" functions added around WinXP time as I recall.
.. incorporated parts of our code, and probably with not a hint of credit either. (Wouldn't want anyone's lawyers worried, eh?)
.zip archiver (for every kind of system from Commodore C-64's to Crays (really!)); and we all learned a lot. So what if none of us made a bloody penny?
Well, they sell it, that's what happens. If they were clever enough to find a buyer (to pay money for what would otherwise be free), more power to them. Hell, you're so smart, YOU go sell it! Feel free!
Add services, support, a fancy front end, user customization, whatever it takes. It's free, like beer! Do what you want!
Contribute to Public Domain if you want; we all do it for our own reasons (usually to share what we've learned, and to encourage more PD code so we can learn some more). If you're concerned about someone taking advantage of that
That was then. Some great stuff came out, and still does. Public Domain, Open Source, GPL, whatever
One great example, of which I was most proud to be a very small part, was the Info-Zip Project (or Workgroup). Google it; that was a project
And I'm sure lots and lots of commercial archiving programs stol... errr
But we were all in the Info-Zip Project for our own reasons (mostly to share and learn); we produced a great